Today is the Sunday before Derby Day, so this week’s aptly equestrian picture is George Stubbs’s monumental portrait (twelve feet across by nearly seven feet high) of the thoroughbred Hambletonian being rubbed down after a race. It hangs at the National Trust property of Mount Stuart, in Northern Ireland.
“Mr Stubbs the Horse Painter” was seventy-five when Sir Henry Vane Tempest, 2nd Bart, of Wynyard Park in County Durham, commissioned him to paint the picture. The baronet was a young man of 28, and a very rich one to boot, having inherited a small estate from his father, the Reverend Sir Henry Vane, and a vast one from his uncle, John Tempest, who had lost his only son in a riding accident – the sole condition of the bequest being that the beneficiary add the name of Tempest to that of Vane. The newly double-barrelled milord bought a string of racehorses, the most successful of which was Hambletonian, sired by King Fergus, son of the great Eclipse, out of a dam by Highflyer. The colt never won the Derby itself, a mile and a half being too short a trip to bring out his best, but he did take the last of the season’s classics, the St Leger, in 1796. It was that success which persuaded Vane-Tempest to buy him. His new owner landed his biggest betting coup with Hambletonian three years later at Newmarket. In the spring of 1799 he and another wealthy racing man, Joseph Cookson, agreed to a match between their two best thoroughbreds. The stake was 3,000 guineas, a vast wager at the time, winner take all.
Hambletonian, ridden by Frank Buckle, was pitted against Cookson’s horse Diamond with Dennis Fitzpatrick in the saddle. The distance was to be four miles, over the nearly straight...
